A Valorant player recently found themselves banned from their favourite game for cheating, despite not having any history of such behaviour in-game. Turns out, the ban wasn’t tied to them, but the second-hand hardware they’d procured.
What Happened?
Gebrauchte CPU erlaubt kein Valorant
byu/After-Cartoonist-196 inPCBaumeister
Here’s the story: German Redditor After-Cartoonist-196 says that they recently picked up a used AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D from its original owner. There wasn’t anything wrong with the CPU, and it worked as a processor of its calibre should.
After-Cartoonist-196 only something was amok when they booted up Valorant and found themselves hit with an instant ban when they logged on. This was odd, as they had been able to play the game with their previous CPU.
They then made contact with Riot Games, who then laid the ill news of the second-hand 5800X3D being the culprit: it had been blacklisted and banned their account on a hardware level, simply because its previous owner was a cheat.
No Unbanning The Banned
Sadly, Riot Games told the Valorant player that there was nothing it could do to lift the hardware ban. Adding insult to injury, the anti-cheat program also locked out the gamer’s other components — motherboard, storage, OS license, the whole shebang — meaning that if they were to sell them as a set or individually in the future, they would effectively lock out other gamers who play Valorant.
On a related note, it is unclear how anti-cheat systems actually function and instating a ban at the kernel level is a bit overkill. On another note, these sorts of situations are exceedingly rare; PC World points out that you’re more likely to become a victim of a scam than to become the unfortunate victim of an issue such as this.
That being said, this is, nevertheless, an issue gamers shouldn’t have to face, Valorant or otherwise. The current state of the PC market is dire enough as is, and this scenario is unnecessary.
(Source: PC World)
